Shadows in the Twilight

7

Afterwards, Joel felt a bit silly.

The Barefooted Man no doubt thought that Joel was a relative of Simon Windstorm. The Loonies.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the Barefooted Man had shouted. ‘You’re heading straight for the furnace.’

Then he’d grabbed Joel by the collar and lifted him to one side.

‘If you fall into the furnace, you’re a gonner,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘Couldn’t you see that the doors were open?’

Of course Joel had seen that the doors to the enormous furnace were open. Even so, it felt like standing in front of a hungry beast of prey that had opened its mouth wide and displayed thousands of burning tongues. And Joel had been lured towards them.

‘What’s the matter with you, lad?’ said the Barefooted Man, looking worried. ‘Has nobody told you that fire is dangerous?’

‘Why do you go around in your bare feet?’ asked Joel.

Sometimes it was best to answer a question by asking a new one.

‘It’s so hot here in the boiler room,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘My feet swell up inside my shoes. So I prefer to be barefoot. What’s your name by the way?’

‘Samuel,’ said Joel.

The Barefooted Man smiled.

‘David and Samuel,’ he said. ‘That really does sound like two brothers.’

Joel looked round in the Underworld. The big furnace was in the middle of a gigantic room. Smoke and steam were hissing out of pipes and ventilators.

The beast of the underworld, Joel thought.

He was being held prisoner here.

‘Where does all this heat go to?’ he asked. He was forced to shout, in order to be heard. The Barefooted Man was busy throwing big lumps of firewood into the beast’s mouth.

‘To the hospital and the vicarage and the old people’s home and the municipal offices, and lots of other buildings as well,’ he yelled.

‘What’s it called?’ Joel shouted.

The Barefooted Man straightened his back and wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘Called?’ he said. ‘I’m called Nilson.’

‘I meant the furnace,’ said Joel.

‘Furnaces don’t have names,’ said the Barefooted Man. Then he changed his mind.

‘Perhaps you have a suggestion for what we should call it?’

Joel thought for a moment.

The furnace was a sort of dragon. A beast of prey spitting fire.

‘Lord of the Fires,’ he said.

The Barefooted Man nodded.

‘A good name,’ he said. ‘Lord of the Fires.’

Then he threw in some more logs, and closed the big doors. He beckoned Joel to follow him. He led him along winding corridors that followed big pipes, and came to another steel door that he opened by rotating a thick iron handle. The door led into another long corridor, lit up by lamps hanging from the ceiling. It was raw and damp, and Joel wondered why the Barefooted Man’s feet didn’t seem to be cold.

He stopped.

‘Do you know where we are now?’ he asked.

Joel shook his head.

‘We’re underneath the church,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘Right in the middle of the church.’

Joel stared up at the ceiling of the stone corridor.

Could that really be possible?

Was the whole church really over his head?

What if the roof fell in?

That would mean he wasn’t buried in the churchyard, but in the church itself.

‘You don’t need to be afraid,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘This corridor isn’t going to cave in.’

They continued along the corridor, which seemed to be endless. It kept turning at right-angles, sometimes sloped downwards, sometimes upwards.

Where are we going? Joel thought.

The Barefooted Man eventually came to a stop at yet another steel door.

‘Sewer No. 1’, it said on a notice board.

The Barefooted Man opened the door. Joel stepped into a room full of tools and dismantled engines.

‘He’s not here,’ said the Barefooted Man.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Joel, but he thought it was just as well. It meant his pretending to be the younger brother wouldn’t be discovered,

‘I expect he’s out mending broken pipes,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘But if you like, you can wait in my cabin.’

Cabin!

Were there cabins in the Underworld?

Joel had never heard of cabins being anywhere except on a boat.

He followed the Barefooted Man back to where they’d set out from.

‘Where are we now?’ asked Joel as they turned a corner in the long corridor.

The Barefooted Man smiled.

‘Halfway between the shoe shop and Leander’s Café,’ he said.

He pointed to an iron ladder fixed to the stone wall.

‘If you climb up there and open the hatch, you’ll find yourself outside the café,’ he said.

This is great, being in the Underworld, Joel thought. Having all those buildings and streets and cars and feet over your head.

David the Caviar Man, who worked down here, must be a good man for Gertrud. Not just for her, but for Joel as well. Joel didn’t know anybody else who’d been down here in the underground.

It struck him that he’d have to change the name of his Secret Society.

Now that he was no longer looking for the dog, he ought to give it a different name.

Lords of the Underworld, he thought.

That could be the Caviar Man and me...

‘Here’s the cabin,’ said the Barefooted Man, coming to a halt.

They were close to the beast of prey again. Joel could hear the roar.

‘I must throw some more wood in,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘You can wait in there for the time being.’

Joel entered the Barefooted Man’s cabin. It wasn’t a big room, no bigger than an average cellar in a small house. A naked bulb was dangling from a wire in the ceiling. There was a wobbly table and a few ramshackle chairs. The walls were covered in photographs of semi-naked ladies torn out of newspapers and magazines. Joel thought one of them reminded him of Sara. At least, her breasts were as big as Sara’s. Joel sat down on one of the chairs. As he made himself comfortable, one of the arms fell off. He hurriedly replaced it and moved to another chair. It creaked and squeaked so much that he didn’t dare stay on it. Instead he sat down on an upturned beer crate in a corner.

It was very quiet. You couldn’t hear the beast through the thick walls and the closed door.

The silence of the Underworld was a new silence for him.

Joel listened. He imagined that the house he lived in with Samuel was directly above his head.

The house that was really a ship straining at its anchor, waiting for wind.

But if the house was a ship, the underground was the bottom of the sea. And Joel was sitting there on an upturned beer crate...

It was difficult to keep all his thoughts apart.

Joel felt the two one-krona coins in his pocket.

As he fingered them, all the thoughts about anchors and the bottom of the sea faded away.

He stood up and walked round the room. The seminaked ladies in the torn-out pictures stared at him.

Why hadn’t the Barefooted Man come back?

Had the Lord of the Fire gobbled him up?

Joel threw himself at the door like a leopard pouncing on its prey. Perhaps the Barefooted Man had locked him in?

The door was not locked.

Joel opened it slowly and peered out into the corridor.

The steel door to the beast of prey’s big hall was ajar.

Joel decided to leave. He didn’t need to wait for the Barefooted Man or David any longer. He knew already that David was the right man for Gertrud. He would offer her the Lord of the Underworld as his good deed. How could she possibly object to such a gift?

But perhaps the Barefooted Man would start to wonder if Joel simply vanished? And David might start asking himself who this unknown younger brother of his was?

Joel opened the door to the Hall of the Beast of Prey. There was a roaring and thundering, and the heat hit him in the face. In the far distance among all the pipes he could see the Barefooted Man throwing logs into the beast’s opened mouth.

Just as Joel reached him, the Barefooted Man had thrown in the last of his logs and straightened his back.

‘I have to go now,’ said Joel. ‘But say hello to David for me. I might come back tomorrow.’

The Barefooted Man wiped the sweat off his brow with a snuff-stained handkerchief.

‘I didn’t know David had a kid brother,’ he said.

I didn’t know I had a big brother either, Joel thought.

‘Can you find your own way out?’ asked the Barefooted Man.

Joel nodded.

The Barefooted Man opened the heavy door for him. Then he ruffled Joel’s hair.

‘I can’t say you look all that much alike,’ he said. ‘David has a mop of fair hair, but your hair is as brown as an old fox’s.’

‘We don’t have the same mum,’ said Joel. ‘I have to go now.’

When he came back to the big entrance hall, it was still empty.

The telephone receiver was still swinging back and forth.

‘Bye bye!’ shouted Joel, as loudly as he could.

The sound echoed round the walls.

Then he hurried out to his bicycle.

When he came to Leander’s Café, he paused and took a close look at the manhole cover in the street.

He’d been down there. Deep down in the Underworld.

He cycled as fast as he could to the newsstand at the railway station. You could buy packs of pastilles with football pictures in lots of places, but he had more luck when he bought them at the railway station than anywhere else. He hardly ever ended up with flabby wrestlers there.

He bought eight packs of pastilles. He’d never had so many in his hand before. He went into the waiting room and sat down on a bench in a corner. He kept an eye on the ticket window. Stationmaster Knif didn’t like people sitting in his waiting room unless they were on their way to somewhere. If you weren’t careful, he would sneak up and grab you by the ear.

There was only one other person in the waiting room, apart from Joel. It was an old lady, fast asleep in another corner. Joel was afraid she might start snoring so loudly that Knif would hear her and come to investigate.

Joel opened the first pack. He started by popping a pastille into his mouth. It was yellow, and tasted bitter. Then he carefully extracted the picture card.

A handball player. Gösta Blomgren.

That wasn’t anything worth having. Not as bad as a wrestler, but pretty bad even so. Joel only knew two boys who collected handball players.

He stayed calm. He had seven more boxes to open. One handball player wasn’t enough to put him into a bad mood. He glanced at the ticket window, then opened the next pack. He swallowed the last of the yellow pastille, and put two new ones into his mouth. There was no need to ration himself. There were at least twenty pastilles in every box. Sometimes there were twenty-two. Once, he’d bought a box containing twenty-four. But there was never less than twenty. He’d been counting and keeping records for several years.

Next picture. An ice hockey player. Anders ‘Acka’ Anderson. He was staring wide-eyed at Joel. Skellefteå ice hockey team, way up north — centre forward in the so-called ‘Mosquito Strikers’. Joel giggled at the thought of the giant ‘Acka’ shrinking and now popping out of a box of pastilles. He’d been flattened out. Flat Head.

Ice hockey players were OK. It was easy to exchange them for something else. If you had three or four good ice hockey players, you could get a rare footballer. If you had Tumba, you could exchange him for anything you liked — but then, Tumba was probably the most famous ice hockey player ever in Sweden, so that was only fair.

Perhaps box number three would produce the footballer he so badly wanted. Joel’s hands were trembling as he opened it. But no! Another ice hockey player, and not only that, but one he’d hardly heard of. This was no good! Still, the next one was bound to contain a footballer. He picked out a red pastille: that was sure to bring him good luck.

As Joel took the picture out of the next box, he held his breath and closed his eyes — but when he opened them he threw the card away in disgust. He didn’t even read the name under the pop-eyed face with big ears, it was enough to see that he was a bandy player. Bandy! A sort of poor man’s ice hockey! Nobody would want to exchange a footballer for a bandy player.

Things could only get better.

When Joel opened box number five, he got a wrestler. A really flabby wrestler by the name of Arne Turnäs.

Turnip, Joel decided angrily, and popped four pastilles into his mouth.

Still no footballer. His luck had run out. A handball player, two ice hockey players, a bandy-playing idiot, and now a wrestler.

Only three boxes left. He ripped open the lids of all three at the same time. Another wrestler! The same wrestler yet again! Turnip! How the hell was that possible? How on earth did they divide up these boxes? Joel shoved a full box of pastilles into his mouth at once, in order to get his own back. Eight boxes and not a single footballer!

The last two were a cyclist and a female fencer. A woman wielding a sword? How could it ever occur to anybody to stuff a woman into a pack of pastilles?

Joel was furious.

He looked at the old woman, fast asleep in the far corner. Her mouth was wide open and her tongue was hanging out.

He tiptoed over to her and put the picture of the female fencer on the old lady’s tongue.

Then he ran off and slammed the waiting room door as hard as he could.

On the way to his bike, he glared at the newsstand. If only he could, he’d have ordered the earth to open up and allow the beast of prey down there to swallow up the whole of the stand in one gulp.

It was nearly eleven o’clock. He was hungry. He popped the contents of a full pack of pastilles into his mouth, then set off for home. On the hill down from the co-op warehouse and the vet’s, he let go of the handlebars and closed his eyes. He plucked up enough courage to close his eyes and count up to ten. He had decided that before he was twelve, he would have enough courage to keep his eyes closed and not hold on to the handlebars until he’d counted up to twenty-five.

When he finally stumbled into the kitchen he poured himself a big glass of milk, and emptied all the pastilles he still had left onto the table.

123 of them.

If they had been pearls, he’d have been rich.

He scooped the pastilles back into their boxes and put them in the shoe box under his bed. He’d drawn a black skull on that box, so that nobody dared open it. A length of cotton hanging down from the lid could easily be a fuse...

When he returned to the kitchen, he noticed that he had a stomachache.

Nothing serious yet. Just something nagging away in the background.

He sat stock still on the kitchen bench, to see if that would bring on something more painful. But no: it was still just a nagging ache.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t like the gripes.

Being in pain was painful. If you had a really nasty stomachache, so bad that it brought tears to your eyes, it made the whole of your body hurt. Even the thoughts you had inside your head were painful.

He sat absolutely still, to make sure that the stomachache didn’t get worse. He counted slowly to 123. Then he could breathe out again. He wasn’t going to get the gripes today.

Nothing could match knowing that you weren’t going to be in pain.

He felt inspired to do something useful. Now was the time to work out his strategy.

How could he set up a meeting between Gertrud and the Caviar Man?

He thought again about what he’d read in books about how grown-ups met in order to decide if they ought to get married. But nothing of what he remembered seemed suitable in this case.

Then he thought about Samuel and Mummy Jenny.

They had written letters to each other, Samuel had told him.

Many years ago, his ship had been in dock in Gothenburg for repairs. Samuel and some of his shipmates had gone ashore one evening. He’d been walking along the street, stumbled on a paving stone and fallen headlong into the arms of Mummy Jenny.

So that was one way of meeting, and having a son called Joel who experienced a Miracle.

You stumble in the street and fall into somebody.

And then you write letters.

Samuel had told Joel that after Jenny had prevented him from hurting himself on the pavement in Gothenburg, he’d persuaded her to give him her address. Then he had written to her from all the foreign ports he’d visited. And in one of the letters they had arranged to meet in Gothenburg. In a park, behind a statue.

Joel thought carefully about all this.

He suspected it might be too difficult to arrange for the Caviar Man to stumble on a paving stone and fall headlong into the arms of Gertrud.

So he would have to miss that part out and go straight to the letter stage.

They could send secret letters to each other and arrange a secret meeting. Then no doubt everything would proceed of its own accord.

Secret letters that Joel Gustafson would write.

But how did you write a letter like that? He had no idea.

The library, he thought. There must be a book there about secret letters. A book as important as that had to exist!

He checked the kitchen clock. There were a lot of hours to go yet before Miss Arvidson opened the library. He would have to be patient.

By four o’clock he had only 72 pastilles left. He thundered down the stairs and cycled to the library.

Miss Arvidson, the lady in charge of the library, was very strict. She thought that nobody ever borrowed the right books. Moreover, she refused to allow children to borrow the books they wanted. On several occasions Joel had put exciting books about murders and other crimes on her desk, but she had pursed her lips and informed him that those books were for adults only.

Joel couldn’t imagine how a book about writing secret letters could be for adults only. Why should anybody have to wait until they were fifteen before learning how to do that?

Nevertheless, he had made up his mind to be cautious. He opened the door quietly, bowed a greeting to Miss Arvidson and took off his dirty boots. Then he went over to the shelves and selected a few religious books. He carried them over to the issue desk.

Miss Arvidson examined the titles and nodded in approval. And started stamping them.

Here we go.

‘I’d like to borrow a book about how to write secret letters,’ Joel said.

Miss Arvidson looked at him in astonishment.

‘Secret letters?’

‘Love letters,’ said Joel. ‘Secret love letters.’

Miss Arvidson burst out laughing. It occurred to Joel that he must be the first person in the whole world who had heard Miss Arvidson laughing. Lots of disbelieving faces peered out from among the bookshelves.

Miss Arvidson was howling with laughter.

She laughed so much that Joel started laughing as well.

That made her furious.

‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said. ‘A book about how to write secret letters! Of course there’s no such book.’

‘Love letters,’ said Joel. ‘It’s not me who wants it, it’s my dad.’

Involving Samuel was no problem, Joel had decided. He never went near the library anyway.

‘If your dad wants to write love letters, he’ll have to manage it on his own,’ said Miss Arvidson. ‘We have love poems. But not love letters.’

‘Maybe that would do,’ said Joel.

Miss Arvidson eyed him up and down, then went to a shelf and returned with two slim volumes.

‘These are pretty love poems,’ she said, and started stamping the books. ‘But next time he’ll have to come and borrow them himself.’

Joel cycled back home and put the potatoes on to boil. Then he started reading the thin poetry collections.

They were mostly about roses and thorns. Tears and desperate longing. The word ‘desperation’ came over and over again.

That would have to do.

When he and Samuel had finished their dinner, he would write the letters.

One letter from Gertrud to the Caviar Man. One letter from the Caviar Man to Gertrud.

He had taken some sheets of letter-paper and some envelopes from Samuel’s room.

His big plan was ready.

But when he sat in bed after dinner, resting his letter-paper on an atlas, it didn’t seem so straightforward.

Where should their secret meeting take place?

There wasn’t a single statue anywhere in the little town. There wasn’t really anywhere that could be called a park. Besides, it had to be a place where Joel could hide nearby and listen to what they said to each other.

He wandered through the whole town in his thoughts. He kept stopping, but failed to find a suitable place.

The churchyard was too spooky after dark.

There were no lights on the football pitch. They wouldn’t even be able to find each other.

In the end, just as he was about to give up, he found the solution.

Mr Under’s, the horse dealer’s, garden.

It was big, there were lots of trees, and Mr Under had nothing against other people besides himself strolling about in it. There was also a little birdbath, which was the nearest to a statue you could find in this place.

In addition, Mr Under wasn’t at home. Every autumn he used to travel south in order to buy horses.

Joel could hide behind the woodshed. It was only a few metres from there to the birdbath.

So that was that! They’d meet at eight o’clock on Saturday evening.

So now he needed to write the two letters. To make sure the handwriting was different, he wrote Gertrud’s letter with his right hand and the Caviar Man’s with his left. The one from the Caviar Man was hardest to write: the letters kept wandering off in all directions and he got cramp in his fingers. But eventually, they were done.

He read through what he had written.

Gertrud’s letter first:

‘Meet me by the birdbath in the horse dealer’s garden at eight o’clock on Saturday evening. If you aren’t there, I shall suffer the thorn of despair. A secret admirer.’

Joel wasn’t sure about the ‘thorn of despair’. He’d stolen the phrase from one of the poems. But what did it mean? He’d chosen it because the poem was written by a woman.

The letter written by the Caviar Man was longer. Joel assumed that men wrote longer letters than women. But maybe it was the other way round in reality?

‘Oh, fondest love of my heart. Meet me at the birdbath at eight o’clock on Saturday evening. I’m aching to meet you after a thousand years of longing. I kiss your tears. Will you drive me to despair? A secret admirer.’

Joel wasn’t sure about ‘fondest’ — wouldn’t it be better to say ‘dearest’? But that was what it said in the poem, so no doubt it was right.

He folded the letters and sealed the envelopes.

At that moment, Samuel entered the room.

‘Are you writing letters?’ he asked.

‘I’ve ordered some catalogues,’ said Joel.

‘I haven’t written a letter for ages,’ said Samuel. Joel thought he sounded sad about that.

‘You can write to me,’ he said. ‘I promise to answer.’

Samuel smiled.

‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘Time to go to bed if you’re going to be able to get up for school tomorrow morning.’

Joel had intended to take his bike before going to bed, and post the messages in Gertrud’s and the Caviar Man’s letter boxes. But he was too tired. He’d have to wait until the next day.

It was cold the next evening.

There was a crackling noise from under his tyres when Joel set off. He parked his bike by the railway bridge and ran the rest of the way to Gertrud’s house. He paused outside the gate. He could see her shadow outlined against the curtains.

So, now I’m going to do my good deed, he thought, and put the letter into the box fastened to the gatepost.

When he came to Lasse the Cabbie’s back yard, everything was calm and quiet. Joel had left his bike in a side street, and crept forward cautiously through the shadows. Now he was General Custer’s messenger again, sneaking through enemy territory with a message that could mean life or death to the recipient.

There were two letter boxes attached to the fence. He bent down, and managed to make out the names even though the streetlight was a long way away.

Then he slid the letter into the slot.

He had to be certain that he hadn’t made a mistake, as the letter box was secured with a little padlock.

So, he’d done it at last!

On Saturday night his good deed would be complete. Then he could concentrate on his geography game. Become a better football player, and find himself a real friend.

He cycled back home. The streets were deserted. He met only one car, outside the Grand Hotel.

He parked his bike in its stand.

Then it dawned on him what he had done.

He froze stiff.

He hadn’t written David Lundberg on the envelope.

He’d written the Caviar Man.

‘To the Caviar Man from a secret admirer.’

How could David know that he was the Caviar Man? Besides, he might not be too pleased about being compared with caviar.

Damn and blast, Joel thought.

I’m an idiot, idiot, idiot!

Everything is ruined.

He sat down on the freezing cold steps outside the front door.

How on earth could he have written Caviar Man on the envelope?

How could he possibly have been so stupid?